


End

by zenstrike



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M, Gen, Here Lies the Abyss Spoilers, POV Second Person, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-21
Updated: 2015-01-21
Packaged: 2018-03-08 13:51:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3211505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zenstrike/pseuds/zenstrike
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hawke, the Fade, and an end that never comes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	End

It doesn’t take much to make you doubt. It isn’t hard to sidestep those doubts as they appear, but every one you think you’ve avoided has a way of crawling under your skin and making itself known to some deep part of your heart. Sometimes it’s just a whisper from a memory: I don’t like to leave Anders alone. There’s no wind here but something carries your words over your head and into the space before you. The memory whispering to you is always one you are trying desperately not to regret but the Fade seems to offer you only two options: regret or forget.

And what if you forgot? You wouldn’t have anything to doubt, then. Doubt comes with memory. With remembering.

You remember Anders leaning on his staff while Bethany eyes him suspiciously. In the memory, you remind yourself that he is not yours, yet. He maintains a distracting distance from you, his eyes not quite meeting yours as he talks. In the real memory, he wasn’t talking to you, he was teaching Bethany.

Memories are how remember them. What does that mean? Dragons and fire and explosions that burn your eyes, but if you look away you’ll look at him and the pain will be too much. Your trust is shattered, blown apart with everything else and with the Chantry as it burns. Memories are how we remember them and you remember, sometimes, stopping him and drawing him into your arms and your heart. This kind of memory doesn’t last. It’s all still too real to be rewritten. Maybe soon, it will stick. Maybe with more distance, but not time because you’re sure time doesn’t exist here. So you create distance, and you walk.

Anders tells you that the Fade is made up of memory and dreams. It isn’t real like we understand real to be, it’s images and fantasies and mages can touch it. For other people, it’s just light on the other side of closed eyelids until a demon barrels through your sitting room.

Anders didn’t say that last bit. You did. Bethany and Anders hadn’t thought it was funny.

Light and eyelids, you think. You wish you could close your eyes but the Fade is insistent: you cannot stop walking, you cannot stop watching. Eventually, you hope, you will simply evaporate and you won’t have to see or walk or remember.

The Inquisitor’s hands shake when she reaches out and takes Alistair’s arm. You can see there’s a protest building in him but she simply says your name and the power of her decision shakes you both. You turn to face the bloody fucking spiders and you don’t look back until you are alone among the evaporating corpses, your body heavy and your ears buzzing. You are bleeding but you are not in pain. When you turn to look back you realize you don’t know which way “back” is, so you do a slow turn and in moments the heavy weight of certainty settles and you convince yourself to die.

But dying is slow. You walk so that you aren’t simply waiting. The ground sucks at your boot and each step makes whispers float up from the ground. Champion, voices whisper. They sound with the buckles of your armour knocking against your chest and against each other, knocking against your heart and you think your heart is bleeding.

No one is coming back for you. You are the only physical thing in the Fade and you must accept this, so you do. When the spiders come, you kill them before they kill you. They start to leave behind ghosts: Anders, watching you leave; the Inquisitor, leaving you; Alistair, asking you for help. Sometimes you see your mother, her eyes blank and her hands--not hers. You walk through her like you walk through all your memories.

You imagine what it would be like to touch the Fade properly, not blunder about it, unable to face your own memories. As you imagine it, it springs to life in front of you and you watch yourself hold Anders until you melt together and vanish into a wisp of something that floats up and away. It taunts you. It frightens, you, though the moment you realize your own fright you have to force the thought, the feeling away, because you wouldn’t know what to do if the nightmare worsened.

This is why you are stuck. You can’t bring yourself to imagine it getting worse, this getting worse. It has to, to finish you.

You walk. In time, your armour begins to fall apart. The memories take buckles and flakes of leather, breaking you down bit by bit. Your blades dull and chip and eventually you drop them. A memory floats up of your father, his laughter as he helps you strengthen your grip and then Aveline, as she marvels at your stubborn hold on the blades, and then Carver, promising he will find a way to overcome your agility, your limbs dancing and daggers flashing.

Carver refuses to learn from you, you remember. When you were younger, before the Blight and Kirkwall and this, your unending End, you were angry because Carver’s unwillingness was matched only by your enthusiasm. You were both stubborn. It’s hard even now to think of your dead little brother, but he is one thing among many that you are trying to forget and not to regret.

Carver, dead, never seeing Kirkwall or the end of the Blight (come to think of it, you never saw the end either, just heard it in whispers and muted celebration). Carver, alive, cursing you. You hear the sound of your own laughter echoing against the space.

Bethany, her armour fitting perfectly but the griffon draining all the colour from her cheeks. You wronged her by bringing her into danger. She should have died, too. You did all you could to protect her, and you ultimately took even her Warden-self from her in the name of that protection. You imagine her and Anders grieving together but it is getting harder and harder for you think of reasons why they would.

You continue walking. You think every step brings you closer to an end and, Maker help you, you need an end. You relive again and again your little brother’s death and your lover’s betrayal and the drama of it all is driving you mad. It makes you want to claw out your eyes or slit your own throat so that you can stop seeing and stop remembering. You don’t, of course, and you walk, and this is all because you foolishly doubt.

The Inquisitor made you believe in your own mortality and this carries you forward. You remember hearing Varric sing her praises, and he offers her help on your behalf. In one of the wispy, teasing memories, Varric shows you where to wait and you peek down at the Inquisitor. Varric promised you over and over that you can always leave, but when he looks up at you, you know that he knows that this Inquisitor is worth meeting, and worth your attention.

She looks at you like you really are the Champion, emerging from one of Varric’s (entertaining, but ultimately trashy) books. (You still want to laugh, remembering that so many people treat the Tale as a biography, a piece of history.)

The Inquisitor stands in Skyhold like a promise come to life. You are suddenly overwhelmingly grateful that she is around to look after Varric, and Cullen, and the entire fucking world, with a side-duty of pissing off a good portion of Orlais. Oh, you like her, and from the moment you met her you believed in her. You think that everything you are, everything that has made you the Champion, all of it is for her. Your story, written in the stars as a prologue to the Inquisitor’s, as a means to make you into someone who can confidently stand alongside her, and die when she asks you to.

Yet you continue walking, and each step makes the voice that recognizes you, the Champion, as a character in the Inquisitor’s story, falter. It believes this a little less and you trust in your finale a little less.

If you believe in the Inquisitor, you believe in her ability to save you. So you stand on the edge of your ending and you look over your shoulder again, and again, and again, and you look because you doubt that this is the end. When you look back and see nothing but empty Fade and vanishing corpses, and when you look forward and see nothing but empty fade and vanishing ghosts, you are disappointed.

You continue walking.

 

 

 

 


End file.
